


Truncheon North

by bookglue



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: F/M, POV Second Person, Pregnancy, Rory and Jess are totally Brooklyn Hipsters now, weirdly structured head-canon stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 19:05:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookglue/pseuds/bookglue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On hot nights in the summer you read picture books on the patio out back. The lights strung across the yard look almost like the stars you can’t find in the city. They remind you of home. The kids come in their pajamas, sprawl on a dozen quilts donated by your mom. You start thinking about a growing life, a growing family. You talk about it with him in bed at night, in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truncheon North

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a little out of practice with these two, but my personal head canon for them spontaneously expanded and this happened. Please excuse any wonky tenses.
> 
> (For Samantha, who gave me the prompt "Rory/Jess, wedding" and Claire, who gave me the prompt "Rory/Jess, children's bookstore.")

The children’s section is crowded and loud. It’s Sunday morning and every parent in Park Slope has brought their screaming toddler to pick over the picture books and play at the train table at the back of Truncheon North. The racket has even found its way upstairs, to your small studio on the third floor.

You’ve been trying to write. It’s the first truly warm day of Spring and you propped open the little window above your desk, the one that looks out over what you could graciously call the back garden, but the warm air brought in the sound as well and you aren’t getting any work done.

You like having your own studio.

On the road you worked wherever you could find enough space to sit, often on staircases or in dark hotel bars. You claimed what space you could and got the job done.

The two years you spent in DC you had the smallest desk in the loudest corner of the press room, but it was the White House and every word you typed felt vital in ways words never did before. They spilled out of you so fast that the tips of your fingers rubbed the letters off your keyboard.

But when you moved to New York it felt like the words stopped.

You were supposed to be writing all the time. You needed content for when the site launched, a backlog of blogs and articles and slideshows, something for people to read when the party started, but the well had run dry.

Your apartment had too many distractions: the new coffeemaker from your grandmother with a million different settings and a foaming wand to master, the four years of viral YouTube videos you’d fallen behind on, the view outside your window of bustling city streets, BuzzFeed lists.

Coffee shops, the home of the untethered writer, were suddenly too loud. Libraries weren’t loud enough. The city’s public spaces were too cold or too hot or too crowded or too damp or too too too.

And then he suggested a studio.

Truncheon had the whole building, a four floor walk-up. The store was going in downstairs, of course, and the press in the basement, but he’d had this big idea about offering classes, maybe creating a meeting space for book clubs or writing groups, and then the two of you needed somewhere to live, the two bedroom at the top of the building. But there was still the back apartment on the third floor, too high up to use practically for storage space and not big enough for meetings or classes. It wouldn’t take much. It was perfect.

So you moved in, bought a desk off Craigslist, and a comfortable chair. You got a cheap coffee maker (bare bones, no distractions) and Luke built you two bookcases and your mom gave you a couple of rugs and her old couch and she sewed a pair of gauzy blue drapes for the tiny window.

And you could write.

You would wake up before the sun was really up and, still in your pajamas, your favorite mug warming your hands, descend the narrow staircase to your private office. Upstairs he would be putzing around in the apartment, you could hear him padding from the bathroom to the kitchen, making breakfast for the both of you, bundling the trash to take down when the store opened.

If you were working on something big, trying to crack something, he’d knock lightly, then leave a plate outside the door, eggs maybe, or a toasted bagel in the summer. If it was an editing morning, or you hadn’t dug into anything yet, you’d climb back up the stairs at 8 and join him. Your feet would wind together under the table while you shared the paper.

When the site launched you had more than enough content, weeks of archives already, and the numbers were good and climbing. You started thinking of the studio like a magic place.

He can write anywhere.

You find pages of his latest manuscript by the kitchen sink, and tucked under the register in the store and once in the refrigerator, on top of a plate of lox. You bought a pack of post-it notes to keep in the bathroom so he would stop leaving himself mirror notes with your eyeliner mid-shower. Nothing distracts him.

In the afternoon, sometimes, you send him up to the studio with his laptop, and you mind the store while he works. (When you reclaim your space at night, in the muddly hours after dinner, it smells just enough like him that you sit and breathe in for a little while and think about your happiness.)

You like Truncheon, the way everyone always seems happy to be there. You like making recommendations, and trying to figure out what people are looking for. You like the feeling of Rory Gilmore: Book Detective.

You bought the train table at the flea market one Saturday morning. The children’s department was small at first, just a few shelves at the back of the room, but when the table arrived so did the families and now it’s almost a quarter of the store.

On hot nights in the summer you read picture books on the patio out back. The lights strung across the yard look almost like the stars you can’t find in the city. They remind you of home. The kids come in their pajamas, sprawl on a dozen quilts donated by your mom. You start thinking about a growing life, a growing family. You talk about it with him in bed at night, in the dark.

(You got married on that patio, your first summer in Brooklyn, under those glittering lights. You always thought you’d marry in Stars Hollow, but Stars Hollow came to you here, filled in the corners of your new home, pulled it together. You got dressed in your studio that morning, looking down on the gathering crowd. You watched him greet your grandparents while Lane curled your hair. He looked happy, easy, warm. You wore a lacy white dress that danced at your knees. Your mother gave you away.)

He teaches a bookbinding class for high school students and then a printing class and then a fiction workshop. The kids like him, but they don’t believe you when you tell them he used to be a troublemaker. They think he’s kind of a dork, so earnest in his obsessions.

You start a neighborhood bookclub. Seven of you (old, young, single, married, male, female, educated and not) on Saturday afternoons, meeting in the lounge on the second floor. You read your way through Pulitzer winners and then Nobel winners and then, for a month, a handful of the trashiest bestsellers you can think of, because every one of you has a copy of _The DaVinci Code_ still lying around.

When you came to the city you thought it would feel big and unmanageable, but your neighborhood feels small and warm. You know the people you pass when you walk down the street. It’s not so different from home, really.

You woke up this morning with an itch at the back of your brain, an idea sitting, half-formed, on the top of your spine. You slipped out of bed without waking him, no easy feat these days, and padded down the stairs to your studio, still rubbing sleep from your eyes.

The stairs have been harder lately, and your fingers hurt from gripping the banisters on your way down, but once you’re at your desk they go to task, digging their way through the first few sentences of whatever this is you’re writing, trying to sort it out.

You’re a thousand words in when you hear him start to move around upstairs, and when you glance at your clock it’s a little past eight. The store doesn’t open till ten on Sundays and you keep writing, write until you feel the shifting in your stomach. The baby is trying to turn over again.

You can’t write when she’s moving like this. The doctor says she’s breech, but she’s determined not to be, somersaulting in your uterus, kicking you in the kidneys. In the morning, sometimes, you’ll watch her head and limbs swing across your belly, like a tiny alien trying to fight its way out.

You get up from your desk and make your way over to the couch to lie down with a book, hoping she’ll quiet soon, let you get back to work, but she’s wide awake and dancing. Half an hour later, when he knocks on the door, she’s still at it. You can see the outline of one of her feet as you call for him to come in.

“You okay?”

He’s got his Sunday uniform on: an ancient Arcade Fire shirt, worn thin around the collar, a gray hoodie and a tight pair of jeans, still in just his socks. His hair is short these days, but still carefully mussed. He looks good.

“We’re fine.” You try to sit up, but your body doesn’t want to move that way. “She’s trying to turn over again.”

He sits down at the end of the couch and pulls your feet into his lap.

You’re not sure why, but you thought he’d look a little wild eyed by this point in the pregnancy. You thought he’d have freaked himself out. It’s just the opposite, though. He seems calmer as the weeks go by, more comfortable with the idea of a baby crowding into your lives. You’re the one who’s a little bit panicked.

You’ve read _What To Expect When You’re Expecting_ 12 times.

You’re reading it now.

He pulls the book from your hands and closes it, losing your page. He’s smiling at you, that lazy drawl of a smile you liked so much when you were 17. “I’ve got to go open the store. Do you want to come down with me?”

You shake your head. “No, I’m going to try to finish this draft. But can you help me stand up?”

It takes both of you to get you back into the chair at your desk, but when you sit down she calms a little. He runs the palm of his hand across your stomach, rests it on the sole of her foot. “You sure you want to stay up here?”

You nod, give him a smile. “Yes. Give me a kiss before you go.”

He bends over to kiss you on the mouth, pulls your face to his. He tastes just a little like toothpaste, and the strong coffee you can’t drink these days. You kiss him again.

“Will you come down later?” he asks. You nod.

“Let me finish this. I should be done by lunch.”

He kisses you one last time and goes to open the store.

You can hear the bell above the door occasionally, as the Sunday morning regulars start to shuffle in, and then the din of the customers rising up through the window, flickering in the breeze, growing louder as the morning stretches on. Your fingers tap across the keyboard, pull out the last few sentences and you click save just as she starts to kick again. Spring is here and soon she will be, too. You close your eyes and take a deep breath in, let the shouts and laughter wash over you before you go downstairs.


End file.
